(Jewish Group) Purim in wartime: Bucharest celebration brings haunting past into present
BUCHAREST — It was fitting, somehow, that on Purim, the holiday where up is down and down is up, the only Ukrainian refugee I could find among the 200 people attending Wednesday night’s megillah reading at the Choral Temple in Romania’s capital was a Moroccan Jew from Marrakesh.
Zakaria Maarif, who is 23, spent the last three years traveling around Ukraine on a kind of self-exploration journey. During some of that time, Maarif said, he had studied Talmud in Uman, the famed final resting place of Reb Nachman of Braslav, whose grave has become a place of sacred pilgrimage. But mostly he lived in an apartment near Kyiv’s Central Synagogue.
Thus it was Maarif’s good luck to be among the first people to secure safe passage out of Ukraine when Russian bombs started assaulting the country on Feb. 24. Rabbi Moshe Azman, spiritual leader of the Central Synagogue, started immediately to requisition buses, hire drivers, work out routes and make arrangements to ensure there would be someone to meet the refugees when they arrived on the other side.
“I heard about how the Jewish community wanted to help people flee, and signed up,” Maarif said.
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